What does AEO actually cover beyond website content?
AEO covers the entire evidence pool an AI engine can retrieve, most of which sits outside a brand's own domain. Reviews, third-party publications, comparison articles, community threads, YouTube, directories, partner pages, and consistent brand facts across profiles all shape how an engine describes and recommends a company. In measured studies of branded queries, owned content accounts for a minority of the sources an engine actually cites.
Your own site is a minority of the evidence
Omniscient Digital's branded-query research found that owned content accounted for only 23% of AI citations, while reviews and other social proof accounted for 57% (Omniscient's research index). That ratio is a budgeting instruction as much as a research finding, because a program that spends its whole budget on owned pages is competing for less than a quarter of the material an engine uses when it answers a question about your brand.
This is the most common gap we find when we run a baseline. The site, the blog, and often the schema are all in reasonable shape, while almost nothing outside the domain is saying the same things about the company that the company says about itself, and that third-party corroboration is what a model looks for before it hands anyone a recommendation.
What a complete program looked like at HubSpot
HubSpot's own AEO program ran on three pillars: on-site content, off-site publisher amplification, and forum and community growth. By the end of 2025 it had partnered on close to 1,000 third-party pages, and its Reddit citations grew from 178 in May to roughly 146,000 in December (HubSpot's AEO case study). The Reddit figure is the one that tends to surprise people, since no amount of on-page markup produces it and it only comes from sustained, genuine presence in the places buyers already talk to each other.
The shape of that program transfers to companies working with far smaller budgets, provided the plan accounts for the surfaces an engine actually reads beyond your own CMS and someone owns each of them.
The off-site surfaces we work
Off-site AEO is broader than link building, though links are part of it. Our system covers expert articles placed on high-authority publications, authority listings and directories, targeted outreach, review volume on the platforms your buyers actually check, and consistency of your brand facts everywhere your company gets described. The point of all of it is corroboration, so that an engine encounters the same claim about you from several independent sources and treats it as consensus.
Schema still earns its place inside this, mostly as a clarity layer that keeps brand facts, services, authorship, and FAQs machine-readable as a site grows, which is what Schema Rocket handles on our HubSpot builds. Markup alone won't carry a program, though, since the citation evidence keeps pointing at the off-site pool as the bigger lever.
